2005-09-08, 12:50 PM
Hello,
anyweb asked that I post an email I sent to him earlier today. The email is shown below.
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Dear anyweb,
I recently started playing with linux on an older Dell Laptop. It is a CPI
D266XT. That is an old Pentium II machine
with only 128 Meg of Ram and a 4.3 Gig hard drive.
I had been running W2k on it but I wanted to try linux.
My first attempt at linux was with Fedora Core 4. Fedora Core 4 worked after
quite a bit of tinkering to get the
US Robotics 802.11g wireless card working. I had to install ndiswrapper and
play with the settings a bit.
One thing that Fedora absolutely refused to configure was the Crystal sound
system. It is a CS4237B chip which
should be supported by CS4236. Unfortionately it looks like Kudzu has some
severe bugs when it comes to older
isa plug and play devices like this sound card.
Since I work with Novell servers on a daily basis I decided to try Novell's
Suse Linux and let Fedora "season" a
little.
Suse 9.3 appears to be a pretty good distro. It had support for the wireless
card with the exception that I had to
install the firmware binary file from US Robotics WXP driver download. Once
that was installed the card came
to life. The sound card ended up taking a little trial and error as I found
out there were several chipset files that
might work. I ended up with a slightly older file working better than the
default file.
Everything seemed to be really rosey until I fired up Yast and told it to
update my system. I used the default selections
of Yast in so far as the security updates and the recommended updates. I
watched as Yast downloaded and installed
the updates. After I rebooted my system, however, I found that I no longer
went automatically to the KDE
displaymanager. Instead I was thrown into a simpler and not very pretty
displaymanager. I searched quite a few
websites and forums and found out others had a simular problem after
updating their SUSE 9.3 with Yast.
Your website was the first one that pointed out the easy fix of editing the
/etc/sysconfig/displaymanager file. My file
was also set to xdm instead of kdm. Once I made that change the system
booted up and went directly to KDE
like it used to.
I can only guess the displaymanager file was updated and for some reason the
older default of xdm was used in the
updated file, probably by mistake.
Thanks again for posting your experience with SUSE 9.3 .
Sincerely,
dzimmerm
dzimmerm@columbus.rr.com
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I hope this is usefull for someone
dzimmerm
